The Genius Plague

by David Walton

  “I take it you were mistaken.”

  I shrugged. “Sort of. The embezzler was actually the provost.”

  She regarded me with an unreadable expression. “Do you have a problem with authority?”

  I felt the blood rushing to my face. I was getting tired of her raised eyebrows and barely veiled disdain. How much did a degree and a neat resume really prepare someone for a job? The Alan Turings and Claude Shannons of the world had been eccentric, inventive, forceful people. Rule breakers. The people at Bletchley Park and Room 40 didn’t stop to check boxes; they got the job done no matter what the cost. This NSA seemed more interested in writing procedures and creating flashy videos than in saving the world. “I might not be a cookie-cutter candidate,” I said. “But I’m more than qualified. I belong in the NSA.”

  She drummed her fingernails on the desk for a moment, thinking. Then she pushed her papers into a stack and rapped them on the tabletop to square the edge. It was a dismissal. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re obviously a pretty smart guy. But we don’t hire candidates without at least a bachelor’s degree.”

  “I know that’s your policy. I was hoping that you’d make an exception.”

  She sighed. I guessed that interviewing candidates wasn’t her usual job, and she was anxious to get back to whatever it was. “And why is that?” she said.

  I squared my shoulders. “Because I care. Because I know that every war, every battle, every skirmish over trade rights and clear waterways is won and lost by intelligence. When I attack a problem, I don’t quit until I solve it. Nobody in this building will work as hard at this as I will.”

  “It takes more than just ambition. You need to finish your education.”

  “I’m a quick study. Anything I don’t know, I’ll learn on the job.”

  “You’re too young.”

  “If you don’t mind me asking,” I said, “how old are you?” It was a cheeky question, and I thought it might get me thrown out of the room, but it actually evoked the first hint of a smile. “I’m twenty-four,” she said. “Unlike you, however, I actually graduated, with a degree in Computer Science from the University of Maryland. I’ve been working here for three years.”

  “And they have you interviewing unlikely candidates?”

  Her expression soured. “It’s a temporary thing. It’s something my manager usually does, but she was unavailable.” She handed a sheet of paper across the table. It was maybe thirty rows of unreadable letters and numbers in five-character groups. Under each row was a blank line. I assumed it was an encrypted text, and the blank lines were to write the plaintext message.

  “Now you’re talking,” I said.

  She pressed her mouth into a line. “Look. This is the practical portion of the interview. You can try it if you want.” Her tone of voice communicated that I shouldn’t bother.

  “But you’ve already made your decision, is that it?”

  “I don’t make hiring decisions. I’m a software engineer, not a manager. I just report on my impressions of your technical qualifications. I’m pretty sure the only reason you got an interview at all is because my manager saw something interesting about your resume—don’t ask me what. If she wants to offer you a position, or call you back for another interview, she will.”

  “Okay.”

  She indicated a computer on the table to my right. “There’s a file in the home directory with the same encrypted message. When you’ve got it solved, copy it down onto the sheet of paper.” Her slim shoulders gave a slight shrug. “They still like their hardcopy around here.”

  She stood, gathering her folder and handbag. “I’ll leave you to it. Good luck, Mr. Johns.”

  “Do most people solve it?”

  She met my gaze. “Most competent ones, yes.”

  She left me alone in the room. I pressed the power button on the computer. Nothing happened. It was just as well. I felt more comfortable with a pen and paper in hand than typing numbers into a spreadsheet anyway.

  I crossed to a printer on the far side of the room and ripped a sheaf of paper out of the tray. Then I started to work.

  The first thing I did was to make a few deductions. First of all, they expected new college graduates to solve this thing. That meant it wasn’t encrypted with modern methods. Public key encryption could be cracked, but it required banks of high-powered computers working in tandem for hours or days or, depending on the length of the key, weeks. So this would rely on somewhat simpler methods.

  I figured the most likely was a Vigenère cipher or something in the same family. It was the dominant style of cipher used during the World Wars, and although it would take some serious effort to crack, I was confident I could do it. In a Vigenère cipher, the message was encrypted by adding a repeating key phrase to it. So if the message was:

  M Y F U T U R E I N T H E N S A I S D O O M E D

  and the key was Shaunessy Brennan, then the message would be encrypted by treating each letter as a number and adding them together. ‘M’ would be added to ‘S’, ‘Y’ would be added to ‘H’, etc. If any sum went higher than Z, it would just wrap around again to A.

  If you knew the key phrase, then deciphering the message was as simple as subtracting it out of the cipher text. If you didn’t know the key phrase, then figuring it out could be remarkably difficult. Fortunately, avenues of attack had been worked out for such ciphers over the years, and I knew them. Unfortunately, it eventually became clear to me that the problem in the exercise was not a Vigenère cipher.

  By “eventually,” I mean that two hours had gone by, and Ms. Brennan had peeked in on me three times, in between her other interviews, to see if I was done yet. I don’t think it was concern for my well-being that had her checking in as much as a desire for me to vacate the interview room. There was a lobby full of other candidates. She must have given up on me after that, because she didn’t check again.

  I was getting pretty worried. I had expected the practical part of the interview to be where I would impress them. I had a working knowledge of cryptological history, and as I told Ms. Brennan, I was pretty good at math. But I was starting to think I had underestimated the competition. The NSA was, after all, the biggest employer of mathematicians in the world, in a country that had dominated world politics for decades. These were the best of the best. Ms. Brennan had obviously expected me to solve it quickly, and the increasingly patronizing expression on her face when she peeked in let me know that I had already failed the test.

  But I don’t give up. Maybe it was a genetic deficiency, or maybe my big brother had knocked me in the head once too often growing up, but I had a complete inability to let a problem go once I’d sunk my teeth in it, no matter what the consequences. So even though I’d been there for hours, my stomach was growling, and I had to pee, I kept on working.

  I tried frequency analysis and the Kasiski examination and the Friedman test. I tried digraph mapping and the shotgun hill climbing method. Finally, out of options, I tried the time-honored approach of every stymied exam taker in the history of exams. I guessed.

  An unknown cipher could be cracked much more easily if you knew some portion of the plaintext. It dramatically reduced the number of possibilities to be analyzed, and if you could determine which portion of the cipher text matched the portion you knew, then in most cases, you could crack the rest of the message as well. I didn’t know a portion of the plaintext, but I still had the deep tones of the male voice actor from the NSA video running through my head.

  I decided to take a gamble. It wasn’t much of a risk, really, since I didn’t have any other ideas, and time was ticking away. They might let me spend all afternoon here, but I didn’t think Ms. Brennan and the NSA were going to let me spend the night working on it. It was now or never.

  I wrote “GLOBAL CRYPTOLOGIC DOMINANCE” on a new sheet of paper and got to work. Twenty minutes later, I had it cracked. It was a Playfair cipher, named for the British lord who promoted its use by the British in World War I
. The plaintext message wasn’t an exact transcript of the video, but it was the same sort of high-minded advertising jargon lauding the mission and vision of the NSA. I was annoyed it hadn’t occurred to me sooner.

  When I emerged from my cave, the lights were turned low and the hallway was empty. I peeked into rooms until I found Shaunessy Brennan hunched wearily over a terminal, typing. “Long day?” I said.

  She looked at me in surprise. “Are you still here?”

  I held up the paper. “Solved it,” I said.

  “The last of the candidates went home hours ago.”

  My heart sank. “I guess I’m a little rusty. I did get the answer, though.”

  She sighed. “Fine.” She held out a hand for the paper, which I passed over. She glanced at it briefly, then set it on the desk. “I’ll add it to your file. Did you certify completion on the web page?”

  “Web page?”

  “The portal, I mean. When you logged in and accessed the decryption tools, the last step was to certify that you’d successfully completed the test. Some people forget that step.”

  “I didn’t use the computer.”

  She stared at me, eyes hard. “The computer in the interview room. For the practical exam.”

  “I never turned it on. I hit the power button and nothing happened, so I just ignored it.”

  “So how did you decrypt the message?”

  I shrugged. “Pen and paper.” I felt a glimmer of hope. If she had been expecting me to use the computer, then maybe she wouldn’t hold my slowness against me. Not that I type any faster than I write, but there might have been tools, Matlab or Mathematica for instance, or at least a calculator, that would have sped the process a little.

  Without changing expression, she stood and walked past me. I followed her back to the interview room. She stopped short when she saw the table, strewn with pages and pages of calculations from my failed attempts. She crossed to the computer and hit the power button, as I had done. Nothing happened. She followed the power cord from the back into a snarl of cables behind the table, and found the plug dangling loose beside an outlet. The outlet was covered with a wide strip of masking tape and a sign that said, “Outlet loose. Maintenance notified. Do not use.”

  She straightened and looked at me, her expression still suspicious. Feeling foolish that I hadn’t thought to check the plug, I shrugged. “Sorry. I like pen and paper. I thought it would be allowed.”

  “The computer has a web portal that introduces you to several decryption tools,” she said. “It assumes a knowledge of Java or C, but it requires no knowledge of cryptography techniques. Most competent programmers can put it together in half an hour and find the answer.”

  I was feeling really stupid now. “I didn’t know. I thought the computer just had the file with the cipher text. And maybe a calculator or something.”

  She picked up one of my pages of calculations, examined it, and set it down again. She shook her head. “You really decrypted a Playfair cipher . . . by hand?”

  Now she was laughing at me. It was probably a story she would put in her repertoire, to tell future candidates about the idiot who spent all day solving it on paper instead of checking the plug. “It was a misunderstanding,” I said. “And I would have had it done faster if I hadn’t started with a Vigenère.”

  “I’ve never seen anyone solve a Playfair by hand. Or a Vigenère, for that matter. Either you’re the smartest mathematician we’ve seen in a decade, or you’re trying to scam your way into this agency.” Her tone of voice made it clear which she thought was the more likely.

  I didn’t say anything. I assumed that she could verify whether or not I had logged into the computer.

  “Does that mean I don’t get the job?”

  “As I already told you, that’s not my decision to make. However, if my boss decides to make you an offer, that still doesn’t guarantee you a job. All offers are conditional on passing the security check, which is no small hurdle. It requires a full lifestyle polygraph, psych exam, background investigation, the works. It can take at least six months for the paperwork to go through, and usually more like nine.”

  “It’s a pain, too,” I said. “I went through it several years ago, when my dad got me an internship with Lockheed Martin.”

  The look she gave me was almost pleading. “Are you telling me that you already have a CSI security clearance?”

  “Well, it’s lapsed,” I said. “But they can usually get those turned around in a week or so.”

  “And you didn’t think that was worth mentioning on your resume?”

  I shrugged, feeling stupid again. “I figured it wouldn’t matter unless I got the job.”

  Her gaze tried to dissect me. She seemed to think I was pulling a fast one over on her, but she couldn’t quite prove it. “I’ll pass on that information, along with my impressions of this interview. I warn you, they will have your claims—all of your claims—thoroughly investigated. It will probably take at least a week before you hear back, one way or another.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. I could feel the grin splitting my face, but I couldn’t hold it back. I could tell that, although she didn’t agree, she thought her superiors would make me an offer. I was going to work for the NSA.

  CHAPTER 3

  I walked out to my car, as high as a mycologist on his own hand-picked stash of magic mushrooms. I was going to work for the NSA. I was going to break codes like Alan Turing at Bletchley Park. I would be an agent, with access to classified information and insights into world politics. I did a little dance as I walked through the parking lot, and it wasn’t just because of the cold.

  I took off my gloves long enough to fish out my key and turn it in the lock of my Nissan—the keyless entry system had broken long ago—and climb inside. I hastily pulled my glove back on before my fingers froze. Temperatures had reached record lows this February, and the meteorologists had been gleefully competing with each other for synonyms of “frigid.”

  I was late to pick up my brother at the airport. Fortunately BWI—the airport formerly known as Friendship International—was only a mile away. I had expected to have some time after the interview, at least enough for some dinner, but he was probably already on the ground wondering where I was. I would have given him a call, but I had left my phone at home, having been warned that I wouldn’t be allowed to bring it into any of the NSA buildings. No matter. I would be there in a few minutes.

  I turned the key in the ignition. Nothing happened.

  I cursed in Portuguese, Spanish, and Tupi-Guarani, and made up a few languages of my own for good measure. The Nissan had been my father’s for a decade before he had sold it to me for a dollar. It had almost two hundred thousand miles on it. The check engine light had been on for months. So I couldn’t really complain. But I was exhausted from a day of decoding, and I hadn’t eaten anything all day, thanks to the NSA’s miserly vending machine. All my good feeling from the end of the interview was gone.

  I tramped back into the building and headed through the metal detector for the lobby front desk.

  “Whoa, sir. Stop right there!” An armed MP blocked my way and put a hand on my shoulder.

  “I was just here,” I said. “You saw me walk out of here thirty seconds ago.”

  “Sir, you need to show me your ID.”

  “My car broke down. I just need to make a phone call.”

  The MP put his hand on his holstered weapon, and his partner started to circle around me. I raised my hands, surrendering. “Okay,” I said. I backed up, pulled off my gloves, and fished my driver’s license out of my wallet. “Here. Same as before.”

  “Sir, we’re going to need you to empty your pockets.”

  “Again? Look, I’m not coming in, not really. I just need . . .”

  The MP actually pulled his weapon out of his holster. He kept it pointed at the floor, but it was as serious a move as I had ever seen anyone make. “Right now, sir.”

  I emptied my pockets. The MP with
the gun stood watching me. The other one came around the X-ray machine to pat me down thoroughly. Both were young, muscled, with close-cropped hair and hard, unwavering expressions on their faces. These weren’t men with a sense of humor.

  A woman’s voice caught my attention. “Mr. Johns?” I looked to see Shaunessy Brennan in a dark wool trench coat and a plaid scarf, slipping on some leather gloves. “What’s going on? Did you forget something?”

  I felt the heat creeping into my face. “My car won’t start,” I said. “I was just trying to get into the lobby and make a phone call.” Though to tell the truth, I wasn’t even sure who I was going to call. My parents were in New York, visiting Julia, and Paul was at the airport, waiting for me. I had attended too many colleges and lived in too many places over the last several years to have any friends close enough to call.

  One of the MPs found my name on a list. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “You’re not cleared for access to the building.”

  “What?” I said. “I was just here. I just walked out of the building.”

  “You were cleared for a four-hour temporary interview access, this morning only,” the MP said. “That access has expired.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.” I could see the front desk through the glass. It was maybe twenty steps away, through the metal detector. I pressed two fingers into my forehead. “I was supposed to pick up my brother from the airport. He’s probably wondering if I’m dead on the road.”

  Shaunessy came around to join me. “You have a phone right there,” she said to the MP. “Can he use it to call someone to pick him up?”

  “Sorry, ma’am. That line has to stay free. No personal calls.”

  She sighed. “Here. You can use my phone.” She walked over to a plastic bin at the end of guards’ table. I saw that it was filled with electronics, mostly smartphones, but a few other devices as well—mp3 players, pedometers, portable battery chargers. Shaunessy rummaged around in the bin for a while before surfacing with a Nexus in a hot pink skin.